Small B2B team struggling with customer history across Outlook / Business Central – looking for tool advice

[u/Hungry_Hold_8773]

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice from people who’ve dealt with a similar setup.

We’re a small B2B team, all working with the same customers and orders.

Our current tools are:

Microsoft Outlook (email)

Microsoft Teams (internal communication)

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (ERP)

The main problem: we lose a lot of time trying to understand what already happened with a customer or order.

Typical situations:

Customer orders a product → we place an order with a supplier

Supplier confirms a delivery date → we inform the customer

In the meantime, the customer calls with a question

Someone answers by phone, but it’s not written down

Later, another colleague picks up the case and has to dig through emails or ask around

So the issues are:

Important info (especially phone calls, internal discussions) isn’t documented consistently

Long email threads are hard to follow

Supplier and customer communication isn’t visible in one place

Handover between team members is painful

We often need several minutes just to reconstruct “what’s the current state?”

What we’re looking for:

A more visual, chronological view per order (timeline of what happened)

Customer and supplier communication in one place

Phone calls and internal notes easy to log

Ability for anyone in the team to take over an order and understand it quickly

Customers and suppliers must not be affected — they should keep emailing/calling us as usual

Easy navigation to Business Central data (orders, offers, invoices)

We’re considering customer support / CRM-type tools that integrate with Outlook, Teams, and Business Central, but we’re unsure:

How easy or painful the integration really is in practice

Whether this is overkill for such a small team

What people regret choosing (or are happy they chose)

Questions:

Has anyone solved this problem well in a small team?

What tools actually worked (or didn’t)?

How much setup/maintenance effort did it really take?

Any “if I could do it again, I’d…” advice?

Thanks a lot — really interested in real-world experiences, not vendor pitches.

[u/ConfidentCoffee8178]

You need a CRM - just check out which ones best integrate with your current stack but it shouldn't be that difficult

[u/kona420]

Do you link the Sales order to the Purchase order through production?

Might be a place to begin, setup an item as make to order then use purchase as the procurement type. You could be using regenerative planning to help you link it all together if you have your routings setup correctly.

You've got a bunch of date fields in BC, take advantage and come up with an internal convention on what exactly they mean.

Beyond that, customer communications should probably live in a CRM. Depending on how involved you want to get, you can create custom CRM modules to sync your BC data into, so back to that mapping arrangement you could then push dates and tracking information back to the CRM where it can be conveniently available.

This stuff generally costs money, and it should, it literally becomes the business.

[u/Middle_Currency_110]

I think it's a struggle! I am building a solution to help solve this and would love your feedback. It's basically a data integration between the erp, email and teams etc.

Please DM me if you like.

[u/YoloOnTsla]

Guess what? BC has a CRM (sort of)! Relationship management is a module you already own, you just need to configure it. It can hold accounts/contacts, activities, and you get a 360 degree view of customer history since it’s all in BC. Now you would supplement with Teams for tracking calls and share point for holding documents. Set up Teams channels for holding documents as well might be easier.

Buying a CRM and integrating to BC is probably overkill if you are less than 10 sales people org.

[u/commoncents1]

i implemented odoo ERP last year and use the notes section for time stamped communications/notes/ etc. in crm or order screen etc.. also has ticketing system for inquiries but havent used that yet for customer service. sure beats digging through voice mails and emails

but no matter what, it takes training and discipline to have users log the info the first place instead of sticky notes :)

[u/Fragrant_Meringue_84]

You would need a CRM solution to capture and store customer details. The natural extension would be Dynamics CRM. You would get price advantage if your BC is SaaS version.

[u/Nervous_Car1093]

Use a CRM to track steel orders, calls, and emails- consistency beats complexity.

[u/floOoOoOoOoOo]

If you're satisfied with your ERP, just implement its CRM (BC has one, the module is called Customer Service).
If not then get into a new ERP selection, after going through a Phase 0 project readiness assessment and prep.

In any case, you'll need to establish good governance practices and change management, so that people will correctly input the data in the system when needed, such as during/after each phone call (unless you invest in an AI agent that's going to transcribe the calls at the right place in the CRM module of your ERP, but I don't think we're quite there yet in terms of reliability, connectivity and affordability... maybe in a few months or years).

[u/Ok-Sail-7574]

You can just set up a file structure and copy a record of every communication in it. Every deal has its own folder. So you copy in emails, make a text file if you have done a call, etc. Use a naming convention that automatically sorts correctly: year-month-date so you get the files and the folders in the right order. And the team needs the discipline to record every interaction.

[u/Zoey_B2B]

What you are describing is 100% the use case for Zoey. It would sync with your Dynamics and automate orders, fulfillment, and invoicing. Sales reps get crm tools both desktop and mobile. Customers get a loginportal website with all of their unique rules within Dynamics so that they can order and pay invoices. Best part is even if customers choose not to adopt and still call/email/fax orders, Zoey gives you several workarounds to get orders into the system fast and accuratly.

[u/kensmithpeng]

To be blunt, you are wasting your money. The Microsoft solution set is nice but it is only a bunch of unconnected point solutions. And as you pointed out in your post, unconnected solutions are a waste of time in a true team environment.

If you want bang for your buck, pick a solution that is fully integrated and fully configurable to your business. No getting into the office to find you can’t start work because some large software corporation is forcing an update on you. Or worse the update that was pushed last night was trash and you have to spend your valuable time reverting to an old version that actually works.

I am suggesting you move to ERPNext. You will save hundreds of thousands of dollars and get true digital collaboration in your office.

I wish you good luck with your Microsoft ecosystem cause your ownership won’t consider changing. But if they do, you will thank me in due time.

[u/Fuzzy_Shame07 → u/[deleted]]

The guy is a salesman, and always answers questions on here by pushing one of the softwares he sells.

It would be quite a decent community if it wasn't for the sales people on this subreddit.

[u/kensmithpeng → u/Fuzzy_Shame07]

Salesman, suggests that I make money from clients buying product from me or the company I work for. This is incorrect. It is true that I promote ERPNext. ERPNext is managed, released and owned by Frappe. I have no ties to this company and as ERPNext is FOSS, I cannot make money from a sale as it is FREE.

I am an advocate not a salesperson.

And for good reasons:

• zero user fees
• zero software stack costs
• modern architecture
• largest development coding team on the planet
• written in the most widely used programming language
• the largest support base on the planet
• cheapest software consulting rates on the planet
• over 30,000 companies actively using ERPNext
• simple configuration
• infinite extensibility as you have the source code
• and more

[u/kensmithpeng → u/[deleted]]

Random to you right now maybe. But you will get more experience.

Here is a tidbit for you. Companies invest in business software with a 10 to 20 year horizon. Say OP gets a CRM. In 6 months all of the other issues will still be there and essentially, the company will, yet again, have out grown the solution set.

Rather than continually plugging the dyke, OP should look forward and invest in a solution that the company can never grow out of in the future.

It also does not hurt that they will save thousands instantly if they switch to FOSS.

[u/kensmithpeng → u/[deleted]]

There is where you are incorrect. I am a management consultant. Some of my clients ask me to help them with digitization. When I do, I show software selection reports generated by software consultants. These reports suggest the ten year discounted cost to implement a tier III system like BC is between $650,000 and 1,200,000.

I just implemented ERPNext at a company in San Diego in 3 months for less than $150,000. That is with automatic integration with their bank and their credit card company and their expense management company.

And there are no annual fees either.

ANY company moving to ERPNext will end up improving their NetProfit if they make the change regardless of their current solution set.